


Am I not your Queen?

by ariadnes_string



Category: Camelot (TV)
Genre: F/M, Restraints
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-13
Updated: 2011-05-13
Packaged: 2017-10-19 08:08:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/198723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do not think of power, then.”  She led him to the wide bed, laid him down on its brocade and velvet coverings.  “Think only of those things that lie between a man and a woman.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Am I not your Queen?

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 5 Acts meme: Round 4, for zelda_zee

Igraine found him his rafters room again—muttering, smock-clad, scribbling arcane symbols on every surface.

Whatever lay between them was still there, for all that he would barely look at her. She knew. She had spent her life in kings’ courts, known marriage and adultery and marriage again. She knew.

Finally, worn down by his queer jests, by the tickle of desire in her belly that refused to go away, she said, “Merlin, am I not your queen?” She did not make it a command, only a question, simple.

“Of course you are, my lady,” he said, looking down at her from his scaffolding perch, mouth in its usual ironic twist. But something dark and soft pooled in his eyes, and she thought she had struck home.

“Then your queen bids you follow her,” Igraine said and left and did not look back to see if she had been obeyed.

In her rooms she dismissed her woman tersely, telling her she had urgent policy matters to discuss with the king’s counsel, they were not to be disturbed. Then she set about removing Merlin’s clothes.

He stood still as a statue, head averted. But an odd, half-shy smile played on his lips, as if she were giving him a gift he would not name.

His lean, brown body was traversed with the same sort of scars that marked his face. She longed to ask what had made them, but did not.

“Why did you say that?” she asked instead. “About burning those who get too close?”

“My power is a curse,” he said, sounding half-mad again. “A torch too easily lit. A weapon.”

“Do not think of power, then.” She led him to the wide bed, laid him down on its brocade and velvet coverings. “Think only of those things that lie between a man and a woman.”

She took two fine girdles from her cedar chest. With one made of tiny links of silver chain she tied his right wrist to the right newel post of the bed, with one made of soft leather, the left wrist to the left.

“As I bind your hands, so you will bind your magic. Can you do that?”

He nodded, eyes huge and liquid, consuming her already.

“Shall I blindfold you as well?” The length of silk was cool in her hot fingers.

He shook his head. “I want to see.”

She shed her long robes, her necklaces and bracelets, the jeweled pins in her hair, deliberately, refusing to hurry. He made no sound, but she could feel his gaze on her, his hunger.

It stirred her—such things always had—and tendrils of desire curled, delicate, between her legs as she freed her breasts from their binding, welcoming their weight with her hands.

He bucked a little when she straddled his narrow hips, brushed against his hardening sex, but she restrained him, moved along his body until she was poised, legs wide, over his mouth.

Then it was her turn to jerk, to gasp, as his tongue touched her. She had used her mouth on Uther many times: at first because he forced her, heavy hand on her head, laughing at her awkwardness; later, as she came to know what pleased him, she enjoyed it, the sharp taste of him at the back of her throat. But he had never done the same for her. It was not a man’s way, not a king’s way, he told her, laughing again.

Some instinct had told her Merlin would be different, and so he was. His tongue was as clever as his fingers, as his mind. He lapped at her, quick as a cat, then drove impossibly deep inside her, twisting his head in that way of his, his bristly scalp pricking her thighs, until she couldn’t help bearing down into it, heard herself start up a low keen of pleasure.

Something built inside her, and she couldn’t tell whether it was spreading outwards from her sex, or whether all the blood in her body was rushing netherwards to meet it. And if the knowledge that the most powerful wizard in Albion lay beneath her fueled her passion, there was no shame in that. Then Merlin found the one spot that made all other sensations dim, circled it twice, and pressed. And Igraine was pulled into a pulsing summer storm of joy.

When she opened her eyes again, flung her hair off her face, and shifted, Merlin was watching her, maddeningly calm, for all his face was flushed, a line of sweat beading his forehead. He should have looked vulnerable like that, spread-eagled between his bound wrists, but he did not. He tilted his head and smiled at her conspiratorially, as if this were one of his experiments that he’d pulled her into.

“My queen,” he said, faintly mocking, “so beautiful.”

And Igraine knew it wasn’t over. She had outlived two husbands, had seen her adult son claim the throne, but the day had not yet come when she believed herself incapable of wiping a smile like that off a man’s face.

She brushed her lips over his, tasting herself, and cupped his sex. He was hard already and she moved to straddle him again, guiding him inside her. It was a pleasure very close to pain to be filled with him, swollen and oversensitive as she was from the first time. But she relaxed into it, tightened herself around him. She circled her hips, reached down to draw her hands along his throat, his dark, pebbled nipples, those strange scars. And felt a flush of satisfaction as he began to strain against the restraints, thrusting up into her in irregular, urgent bursts.

Merlin’s magic was still bound, she knew, but perhaps because they were so closely joined now, Igraine imagined she could feel it, pushing against whatever internal walls or nets he used to pen it in. She wondered what it would be like if those defenses were breached, or if he were to loose it of his own accord. Like riding with the Wild Hunt, she thought, outside human ken, eldritch and free across the night sky.

The image pulled her into the storm again, and she climaxed almost as he did, thighs shaking, breath coming ragged in her throat.

They did not linger. Igraine undid the girdles, and Merlin sat up and rubbed his wrists, clear-eyed and loose limbed, far removed from the madman she had found in the attic.

“You’ll join the king’s table for supper?” she asked, restoring order to her hair. The core of her felt raw, engorged, throbbing dully in the aftermath of pleasure. But a splash or two of cold water to the face, and no one would be the wiser.

“Of course, my lady,” Merlin said.

“Good. The king has need of his counselor.” Igraine smoothed her skirts and turned to face Camelot again.


End file.
